


The Eagle and the Hind

by alephthirteen



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Bottom Fleur, Druidic Sex Magic, F/F, F/M, Fleur Just Wants Hermione to Ravage Her, Gay Weddings, Hermione is Shocked That a Girl Likes Her, Hermione's Dad Is a Bit Thrown By Getting His Memories Back, Hermione's Mom Loves How the Memories Came With Free Daughter in Law
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-11
Updated: 2021-02-12
Packaged: 2021-03-15 22:02:37
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 14,496
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28695897
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alephthirteen/pseuds/alephthirteen
Summary: Hermione stands victorious. Neville agreed to disguise himself as Harry for the final duel and in his confusion at having killed the wrong one, Hermione, Fleur and their veela allies were able to poison him and kill him in a druidic sacrifice.That was the easy part.  The hard part will be building a life with the girl of her dreams who justkissed her all of a suddenwhile Hermione was soaking her bruised body.ORThe one where Hermione's family and Fleur's family get along and the Golden Girl butts heads with homophobic ministry bylaws.
Relationships: Fleur Delacour/Hermione Granger, Harry Potter/Ginny Weasley
Comments: 21
Kudos: 250





	1. Sacrifices, Soul Shards, and Spycraft

**Author's Note:**

> This work is being copied over from another site, where chapters are posted four weeks early. [See the story here.](https://tinyurl.com/yyja8l9w)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where Hermione uses resistance tactics to save muggleborns, Neville makes the ultimate sacrifice, muggles have unforgivable weapons too, and not all fragmented souls are evil.

Harry's body topples backwards into the rubble. The dark lord's scaly face twists into a hideous imitation of a smile.

"Boy who lived, eh?"

He turns to look at the castle.

"Collect the spares. Kill the mudbloods. Bring the body to the headmaster's quarters. I need to be sure."

Fleur's hand is tight in hers. Uncanny power, like a steel trap shutting. She can feel the tickle of down feathers growing and shrinking from the blonde's skin, tickling her fingers.

"Soon," Hermione whispers. "Soon."

It's a shit plan, but in her defense, the boys' plan was worse by far.

Gryffindor to a fault, they somehow thought that being killed was the best way to win a fight. Part of her hopes she did real damage when she knocked Ron out. He was never the muscle or the brains of their trio, more like he was the backbone. Harry's unearned, unwanted powers and prophecy. She brought the ability to keep two squabbling boys who crushed on her whilst keeping her grade up. 

Ron though, Ron brought courage and stubbornness that would make a rock proud.

So let him wake up in Calais, past the charms the French have woven along their coast. Let Harry and Ron hate her for the fakeout for the rest of their lives if that helps. They'll be alive, no matter what happens to her.

Hermione tilts her wrist to glance at her smartwatch. Every time a refugee is tucked away in friendly nations, it subtracts their name. The counter is dropping faster and faster now.

She's seen precious little of magical Britain worth saving. Just the people. The best of them were also smart enough to know a lost fight when they saw one and were willing to flee through the network she and Fleur created to shuffle refugees and artifacts and texts into continental Europe. 

No one but a muggleborn would have been able to build it.

Magical historians don't cover the world wars, they cover Grindelwald. They don't cover the Holocaust or Stalin's purges either, except to shake a finger at the filthy, hateful muggles that they are so much better than.

No one expected the resistance to use muggle spycraft. Dead drops of paper printouts encoded by an Enigma machine stolen from the British Museum do not set off a Death Eater's searching spells and they cannot rip the ciphers out by torture because books cannot be broken with the Imperius curse. Poisoned needles hidden in umbrellas kill just fine. So do sniper rifles and car bombs. Except those tools are _muggle_ tools, outside what the haughty, puritanical enemy expects.

Hermione chased down every method she could for sneaking men, women and children past genocidal lunatics. Two weeks in New York interviewing survivors, four weeks in Israel, two in Russia.

Summer holiday of her fourth year was learning how resistance movements succeed, summer of the fifth year designing her movement, and the sixth year's summer holiday was spent implementing. Fleur arranged for agents, mostly witches working for the Versailles Coven and freelancers from southeastern Europe and Turkey.

Babies were tucked into library carts bound for muggle libraries, passed off and loaded into mail trucks driven by outcast wizards who preferred punching a muggle clock to the magical world's insanity. A chain of handoffs, each nestled within institutions known for defending privacy. Men left their wands behind and went abroad to football matches to disappear into the crowds. Girls and women, they snuck into nunneries. One abbess was a lapsed witch. She ended up leading the Welsh part of the network for protection runes and charms placed on the convent and fertility enchantments in the vegetable garden.

The watch flashes red to get her attention and she glances down.

Zero.

Every refugee on the list is past the border. Hermione twists the crown to switch apps, loads the mail app and pushes send. All over Britain, muggle allies and trustworthy witches have been tailing their targets as they stalk the streets. Now they're assassinating the Death Eaters by spell and blade, poison and bullet. No warning. No demand for a duel between honorable foes. Kill or be killed.

Voldemort's cheek twitches when he senses their deaths through the Dark Mark. He levitates Harry's body with a flick of the fingers and storms off towards the castle.

"Now," she whispers to Fleur, letting her hand go. "Try to transform."

"I can't," she hisses back. "You know that. I am only one-quarter veela, _belle dame_."

She wants to roll her eyes at the flirting but can't bring herself to. Fleur's presence beside her is the only thing anchoring her mind into her body and preventing her from going insane.

"No," Hermione replies. "You can, I know you can. Keep trying."

Ever since the Triwizard Tournament, she's struggled. The simplest of charms would fail or sputter. Not often, but often enough. Muttering a quick _lumos_ to light her bedroom would leave her blinking, temporarily blinded by the glare. Summoning her toothbrush once knocked her out cold as the object in question flew like a cannonball towards her. Never the complex spells though.

So she dug into it. Worked it like any other problem. The breakthrough was the centaurs in the Forbidden Forest. One approached her after they ravaged Umbridge, cantering and avoiding eye contact. Bothered by the grisly and perverted nature of her injuries. It was their inner beasts, he said. Madness and lust in a way they hadn't felt in centuries. The animal half took over the human half.

Magic wasn't broken, she discovered. It was turbocharged. The effect was spilling across Britain with each passing day. Assumptions used for centuries were now wrong and long-honed spells were lopsided. Like equations with a variable changed so they longer equaled zero. Magical beasts like the centaurs, who had been more prim and genteel than most humans went into rages and ruts and frenzies. No doubt that's how so many students have become animagi in the last three decades without killing themselves.

She realized Hogwarts isn't just a symbol of Britain's wizarding culture, the crown jewel of learning — and thus indoctrination and propaganda — it's a plug in a bathtub, sitting atop ley lines by the dozens. Old ones that snake through the United Kingdom, Ireland and stretch from Iceland in the west to Finland in the east and go as far south as Morrocco. Maps show that it all tangles here tangle here like a bunch of spaghetti.

That's how hundreds of stone golems can be animated here with a single word from McGonagall, or how apparition can be blocked on a thirty-thousand acre campus for centuries on end. Impossible things. The land does the heavy lifting. After seventy years of dark wizards attacking on the spells and defenses, they're weak.

The land is trying to tear apart the offending castle off and return to a wild state.

Quarter-veela are typically not able transform but Fleur can if she tries here. Hermione's more worried Fleur will find herself unable to change back. That she'll have a half-woman, half-eagle for a best mate for the rest of her life.

Fleur gasps and Hermione turns from watching the bored Death Eaters. Where her best friend had been, a strange creature stands. Clad in silver feathers, black talons capping each finger and her sharpened face armored in beaklike plates. Flame gathers in both her hands and she screeches in alarm.

The patrol of Death Eaters at the other end of the courtyard turn.

"Run!"

Fleur pours the fire into a long flare and takes flight before they can reply. Hermione flings a shattering spell at the stone archway over their heads.

\-----

The Boy Who Lived is dead. Losing the horcrux he put on Harry is unfortunate. Perhaps he should kill this traitorous little ginger cunt to make a new one.

Bellatrix's fascination with him was girlish fantasy and base urges but useful all the same. He didn't need to enjoy having her in his bed. It motivated her and that was enough. She was his best. His right hand. Lethal. Heartless. Deranged and unstable, but even that could be useful.

Somehow, this little whelp of a blood traitor disarmed her and bashed her head in with a fire poker.

"Aren't you sweet as cream," he jokes, drawing an envenomed claw across her cheek. "Not surprised it took your mother six tries to make something so beautiful."

He settles behind Dumbledore's desk.

"Would you like me to leave you alive long enough to attend your brothers' funerals?"

She spits across the desk, managing to catch him on the mouth. He raises the Elder Wand.

"Very well. _Avada kad_ -"

" _Accio_ Ginny's belt!" someone shouts.

The ginger squeaks in surprise as she is yanked towards the door, doubled over at the waist by the suddenness of it. The curse sails past her head and instead strikes one of his Death Eaters who had been standing near the door.

\-----

This cannot be.

Death Eaters are strewn lifeless around the room, bloody froth spilling from their mouths. He can't move. Whatever this poison is, it's vile. Difficult to keep his skin from bubbling and his lungs from coming up in bloody chunks. The gas is invisible, making it impossible to blow away with a spell.

A woman leans in the doorway, her face obscured by some hideous helmet and her breath rasping like it was passing through sand. She holds a fat metal tube in one hand and her wand is trained on his head.

"Tom Riddle, we meet again."

His voice is rough and weak but he can speak.

"Did you come to see Harry, you mudblood twat?"

"Now, now," she scolds. "Is that any way to talk to a woman holding a canister of nerve gas?"

She twists one end of the rod until something inside cracks and tosses it onto the desk.

"I'll see you again later for dinner."

——-

These springs on the east edge castle's foundation laid hidden for fifteen centuries.

Hermione aches. Every muscle burns and brilliant bruises from her last scuffle with a Death Eater pepper her hands, face and no doubt her torso. She peels her shirt off, creating a sharp flare and biting her lip to keep from screaming. Her legs fared better so the jeans are easier to get off, though the sweat soaking through them means they take her knickers off too.

After a quick poking of each rib, she satisfies herself that none are broken. There's sand for scrubbing, and cold water and a ring of trees to give her some alone time. She can hardly take a bath in the pile of half-melted stone that had once been Hogwarts.

Surely leaving Voldemort's body pinned to the keystone of Hogwarts with a sword through his heart has earned her a bath? 

The druidic magic she used was old. Scholars think it predated the use of iron. The spell was all blood and skin, tooth and nail. Painting herself in her victim's lifeblood and painting curse runes on Voldemort with a vial of her own blood she'd kept in her pocket for weeks until it was curdled. Strangling him, then tearing his throat out in her teeth once he finally spilling his guts with a knife she carved of oak wood.

Standing atop one of their old temples, Hermione offered a triple sacrifice in a rite used by druid priestesses a thousand years before anybody even heard the name Merlin.

Then she collapsed beside the altar, naked and exhausted.

Visions of some massive, antlered man sizzling in her brain. She came to her senses and Pansy Parkinson was handing her her clothes. Draco Malfoy shuffling brokenly behind her, a Slytherin who somehow didn't expect betrayal from his own ranks. 

They buried Neville first after taking the disguise curse off. Anyone who thought he was a coward surely knows better now. Only the bravest man would agree to pretend to be Harry Potter's in a duel with Voldemort.

That was that.

After setting the Elder Wand and the sword on a moss-covered boulder, she lowers herself into the frigid water. She doesn't dare take her eyes off them. It's highly doubtful that Gryffindor's sword can _only_ be used for pure and virtuous things and the Elder Wand is trouble, no matter who is the current master.

She loves Harry, truly. Some days she can keep it in safe places and he's just a friend. Some days it all bubbles up and she wants him, as smitten as any other girl in Britain. More so, she supposes, because she doesn't want a scar and a last name and to put one over on the other girls and be popular. He's a good person.

Branches crackle behind her and she leaps up, calling the Elder Wand to her hand with a curled finger. Her limbs protest and the combination of nudity and cold water dripping off her hurts worse than the bruise.

It's Harry and Ron, followed by Luna and Ginny. Luna's cheeks go red as her lipstick and Ginny's blush fills in the gaps in her freckles.

Harry's fist catches her in the jaw, twisting her head sideways. She doesn't look in his eyes when she turns back. Ron stands gaping beside him, like he's not sure whether he's more surprised Harry hit a girl or that Hermione is alive.

"Hello to you too. You made it back faster than I thought you would."

His eyes are red, and tears have cleaned half the grime off his face.

"You could have died!"

"I didn't."

"I can't lose you."

She works her jaw back and forth.

"I'm not surprised you're angry with me but hit me again, hit _any woman_ again and you'll lose me for sure."

A gust of wind signals Fleur's return. Her taloned fist holds a half-dozen wands and many of the feathers on her wings are bent or nicked. Downy fluff covers her from head to toe she is speckled with blood, soot and mud.

"Fleur?" Harry whispers.

"'Arry Potter, I dislike seeing you hurt 'Ermoine. Never do zat again."

She drops the wands next to Hermione's feet.

"Last of them?"

"Yes, 'Ermoine."

"Any bodies?"

As the feathers recede into tanned skin, white fire licks across Fleur's fingers before winking out.

"Not anymore."

Hermione has never seen Fleur Delacour naked before. The last time she felt this lightheaded was the day she learned she was a witch.

Fleur Delacour was a puzzle when first they met, a rival during the tournament, and then she was a perfect little songbird hovering around her friends. Watching movies on the couch. Sampling British food, dragging Hermione to restaurants every chance she could. Touring libraries. Chasing sheep up and down the hills near Hogwarts. Summoning butterbeer foam into a fake beard and imitating Dumbledore. Anything to make Hermione laugh.

The other girls hated the Frenchwoman's presence every summer and told Hermione so. Repeatedly. Loudly. Angrily.

She thinks that's because they envied her beauty or her effect on the boys.

Until this exact moment, Hermione hadn't understood why she never once felt jealous of Fleur. Never bristled at her like the other girls.

The veela smirks, drinking the effect her thrall has on the onlookers and then twirls her fingers. A robe of green and black silk forms around her shoulders. The sash pools into her hand and she ties the robe shut. She moves the sword aside and sits in its place, crossing her legs and letting the magic inside her erase the cuts, bruises and scrapes she received.

Her perfect flesh is being reformed because it is impossible for Fleur _not to_ be perfect. Fleur acts like that's nothing. She cannot help but be beautiful so she doesn't value it, Hermione supposes.

Hermione tears herself away from the sight.

"I'd like to finish my bath, Harry."

Ron and Harry jump back at the same time.

"You're naked," Ron mumbles.

"Well spotted. Only took you five minutes."

Harry's eyes focus on the ground at his feet.

"We will, ah, go take a walk."

Hermione smiles.

"I managed to save some of the faculty parlor's liquor. Don't get too drunk without me."

Luna and Ginny depart without a word, though Ginny gives Hermione a look she can't make sense of.

Once they've gone, Fleur stands and unties the robe. It whispers off her body and onto the stone. She saunters towards the pool, dragging a single finger across Hermione's arm as she goes.

"My, my. You are splendid, 'Ermoine."

As they settle into the water, Fleur sighs.

"It is over."

Hermione hasn't brought up what happened to Bill yet. She's not sure how. Fleur isn't acting like someone widowed two days ago. Since she looks no worse than anyone else and everybody here lost someone. It's more like she lost a friend.

"Are you all right?"

She shrugs, reaching her foot under the water to press a toe against a not-yet-damaged spot on Hermione's belly.

"I will be. Bill died saving the man he loved," Fleur explains. "Will I miss him? Of course. But Jacob is the one hurting, not me. Our marriage hid their affair and it kept Bill from being investigated by the Morals department of the Ministry and also made sure my family's fortune was secure."

Her eyes catch Hermione's.

"And he didn't snore."

Hermione giggles. She can't help it.

Fleur splashes her.

"What? That's important in a husband!"

"Yes," Hermione teases. "That's the only important thing."

"He never got a chance to tell the Weasleys. We hoped for twins so one would take my name, one would take his. We thought perhaps after that, he could come out."

"Maybe you should tell them. At least Arthur and Molly, and soon. So that they can really remember all of him. It would honor his memory."

Fleur lunges, grabbing Hermione's face with both hands. Everything is Fleur. Her soft skin, her warmth, that sweet smell, like salted caramel.

"But first…" she purrs "…it's important that the hero gets the girl, no?"

She presses her lips to Hermione's. Every awful thing that ever happened was worth it.

\-----

"Right," Ron mumbles, twirling the stray cheese from his slice of pizza.

Today's funeral was in New York. There's been one every few days for half a year.

"I'm just going to ask. How'd you do it?"

Hermione pauses with her own slice halfway to her mouth. Fleur gathers sauce onto her finger and smears it on Hermione's lips. Her lips part on reflex and she licks it clean. Fleur is utterly shameless now and veela magic or a newfound love or something means Hermione's no better. They'll share a glance over a meal, or during a morning jog and just come together like two magnets.

They've gotten fined twice in New York and they've only been here two days.

It's like breathing.

"He asked a question, darling," she teases.

Hermione swears she was smart once upon a time. That was before kissing Fleur. Now, in the after-Fleur, she can't string together a sentence to answer Ron.

"How'd you kill you-know-who? The aurors who questioned me wouldn't say."

She takes a bite out of her pizza.

"Dead simple, really. Stabbed him with Gryffindor's sword on the old druid altar that Hogwarts was built on top of, ripped his throat out with my teeth. Then the next night, I ate his heart raw."

The boys stare at her. Looking at her with such shock, she wonders if they'll ever blink again for the rest of their lives.

Fleur reaches over with a fork and lifts their chins to close their mouths.

"Silly boys. You will catch flies."

"Gross," Harry manages to say.

"It was. I think it had gone rancid. I puked up evil wizard for most of a week."

\-----

"Are you sure, Fleur?"

Her girlfriend's face is pale and her hand on Hermione's back is cold and sweaty.

"I want to," Hermione admits. "But this feels a lot like Horcrux magic."

"Hocruxes are made from cruelty. This is love. I will cut off half my soul and give it to you. You will do the same. Then we say the words and exchange our gifts."

She sighs.

"We are not telling our children we made a stupid teenage suicide pact. Agreed?"

"Agreed."

Fleur adjusts herself, pressing her naked body closer. She's in Hermione's lap and Gryffindor's sword is in her hands, the tip pressed against her spine, aimed so that it can pierce both their hearts at the same time.

"Ready?"

"Let me kiss you, first."

\-----

Hermione wanted to put the soul fragments in their wedding rings but Fleur insisted that for the blessing to work, it must be something mad. Something impulsive, the sort of thing lovers do when they're not thinking straight.

One night, Fleur's rom-com stuffed rotation on Netflix came around to Titanic.

The next week they were in Japan for yet another funeral, a third-year from a Japanese school who was visting her friend when she got sucked into the war.

Hermione rented a boat and then sailed out at sunset.

"Here?" Fleur asks.

"Here."

Fleur looks around then raises a honeyed eyebrow.

"Why?"

"Because we are right above one of the deepest places in the ocean."

Hermione takes the sky-blue diamond that reminds her so much of Fleur's eyes from the pouch around her neck. She presses it to her lips then holds it out over the water and waits for Fleur to nod, then lets go. The cold water wraps around the stone and she feels cold tendrils curl around her heart when it does.

"Any deeper, and it might crack. I want it to sit there forever, safe in the abyss. Sunken treasure."

Fleur rushes over, winds her right hand around Hermione's waist and holds her own soulstone -- a tiny, smoky ruby -- out with her left.

"Marry me, Hermione Granger," she pleads before she drops the stone.

The scar under Fleur's left breast glows cherry red, visible in the night under her thin blouse. Hermione's scar answers with a sharp twinge of pain.

"I want nothing more, Fleur Delacour."


	2. Paperwork and Researching a Wedding Dress

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where Hermione and Fleur have to deal with the Ministry and Ron gives fashion advice for the magical wedding.

This must be what it feels like to go mad. The ministry's new rule that visitors check in their wands is a good rule. A nod to proper security and not being a bunch of halfwits about it. The senior surviving auror admitted it was the first review of security they'd done since before the Battle of Hastings.

Sensible precaution because if she had her wand on her, Hermione could kill the man before he blinked. She hasn't practiced enough wandless combat magic to risk it. At least, not with the auror's office two doors down.

"I'm sure you understand, Miss Granger. It is a, well, ah…a delicate time for the registry of names and bloodlines."

"Delicate?" Hermione gasps. "Delicate? Is that what you call it when three quarters the pureblood families on this registry march in lockstep in a organized campaign of slaughter? Against the muggle-born and the muggle-friendly, the only wizards with enough creativity and common sense to stop you? I call that butchery. In the real world, it's a war crime. Hate to see what you lot think is _indelicate_."

The registrar nods eagerly.

"Exactly! It's all very sensitive. People need the familiar. If word got out that two of our saviors were engaged in this…behavior, it would be bad for their spirits. This is no time for making waves, you two must understand that."

"I understand nothing!" Fleur hisses. "'zis woman saved your life! All of your lives."

Veela thrall and unformed, feral power rolls off Fleur in angry waves like summer air off a tarred road. The human side of Fleur is rapidly losing the fight for control with the veela's less seductive abilities and tendencies. This poor excuse for a man is about to get an eyeful. Hard to say whether that will mean Fleur sprouts talons and gouges his eyes out or rips her clothes off and takes Hermione for a spin on top of his desk.

"Surely," Fleur purrs. "You can just take 'zat remarkable quill…that is falcon feather, yes?"

"Ah, yes. It is. You have an eye for luxury."

"Marvelous volume on that," Fleur coos. "Take 'ze wonderful quill and scratch our names in?"

The little man coughs and runs a finger under his collar. Seems he's about to flop-sweat the wax out of his mustache.

"The idea of marrying witch to witch is…unworkable."

"Unworkable?" Fleur scoffs.

She folds her arms and pouts — Merlin's beard, it's cute — at not getting her way. At him having enough of his wits left to stick to his script despite her attempt to seduce and puppet him.

"It works better than you think. Ze parts fit together nicely, I assure you. Zis woman is truly magnificent," she jokes, catching Hermione's fingers in her own.

It's officially progressed to boasting about sex. Stage two in the six-stage death spiral that is a conversation with an angry veela. Hermione's done her best to be the model partner, so she's fairly certain she hasn't suffered through stages five and six yet.

"Oh my god," Hermione groans. "Really? Really, Fleur?"

The registrar frowns.

"No. My apologies, ladies, but I cannot ignore my oath to the wizards of Britain, even for you."

The nail polish on Fleur's right hand is a candy red shade that is from some magical makeup shop — a thing, apparently — near the flock's mansion. Actual polish, not a charm or a conjuration. Pools of black are rising in it, the shade of the claws inside. Not long until the talons are digging trenches in the shabby wood of the desk.

It drove Hermione half mad to watch Fleur paint it on. When Fleur perched on the side of the bed in the shabby inn, leg propped on the stool to paint her toenails, Hermione didn't just forget how to breathe, she forgot what air was.

"Fleur," she whispers, drawing her fingers across the back of her fiancée's hand. "Calm down."

_Don't make me repeat it. Don't make me go another instant without kissing you…_

Hermione shakes the fog of Fleur's presence off long enough to curl fingers around her wrist.

"Leave it, Fleur. It's all right. Let's go."

With a melodramatic sigh of Biblical proportions, Fleur stands and settles her Beauxbatons cap on her head. The secretary in the waiting room is forty years younger than her boss. Two, perhaps three years out of Hogwarts.

"Not a good day to get an autograph, is it?" she sighs.

"Not really."

"I hope you'll mention us in the ministry interviews, miss!" the registrar calls after Hermione.

"Fuck," she hisses. "We have more of those, don't we?"

"Yes, love," Fleur teases, patting Hermione's shoulder. "More people want to pick at your miraculous brain. Today is the ministry for papers and offices, I believe?"

"God help us," Hermione croaks. "The bean counters. The old men who run ministry audits and draw up their processes want me to say good things about the ministry bylaws after that homophobic little cock-up?"

_I'm halfway surprised they can figure out how to take a shit._

"It seems rude to ask," the secretary agrees.

"I seem to remember that you were called away. Didn't I see Rita Skeeter flitting about? Yes. You left to avoid Rita Skeeter. After all, I highly doubt the Heroines of Hogwarts would make us look good if cornered by press this afternoon. A dressing down by two up and coming young witches would gut our budget."

"So best not risk it. Run along. Shoo. Out of the building. Have lunch. I insist."

She slides an envelope across the table. Their registration fee. Their non-refundable registration fee for a marriage.

She's chasing Fleur's smile into the sun before Hermione remembers that Rita Skeeter is nursing a dozen nasty curses at St. Mungo's. It's all her rivals at the _Daily Prophet_ can write about, so everyone has heard.

All courtesy of Hermione and a poorly worded interview question about Fleur's attire at the Minister's swearing-in ball last week. She won't be interviewing anybody until the doctors get all the incandescent mushrooms out of her pores.

It turned out that in fact, yes, magic was the only thing that had been holding Fleur's gown on all night.

——

_These little puff things are delicious._

The flap on the tent Hermione is using flies open.

"Ron!" she hisses, gesturing madly for him to come inside.

"What?"

"Don't be a prat. Quit stuffing your face and get in here."

"I'm not sure…"

"Fuck's sake, Ronald Bartholomew Weasley. If Fleur thought anyone here could take me from her, they'd be bleeding out in the grass."

Last night, he realized that Fleur Delacour isn't beautiful at all. She's a bloody menace. He felt like a mouse under a lion's paw as he tried to stammer out that he and Hermione were not a couple. Before sixth year, he told her, a few months at most. The veela's blue eyes never left him, even as she paced, slashing at her tent's walls with talons that came and went with her moods. Then she drew herself up and nodded, handing him a vial. The antidote to the toxic lipstick she was wearing, she explained. 

He's never going to let someone kiss him on the cheeks when they say hello. Never again.

"Ron!" Hermione hisses again, breaking the cobwebs out of his head.

"Right."

He plucks a handkerchief from his father gave him out of his breast pocket and cleans his fingers. He ducks inside the tent.

This place is so Hermione it hurts. A stack of books sit on a hastily conjured desk, beaten within an inch of their life. Probably a hundred feet of parchment. Notes, sketches, big blots of ink.

Probably read all that overnight in a single mad dash. There are muggle books on marriage and various treatises on being the perfect magical wife. A book by someone named Virginia Woolf. 

_Talk about an uncreative name for a werewolf to use._

Only Hermione would assume she could just study her way through her own wedding day.

"What's up?"

"How do I look?" she asks, her cheeks red as the Gryffindor scarf around her neck.

_Like I'm the biggest idiot in the world, having not tried harder for you._

"Bloody perfect, why?"

"Ronald," Hermione begins.

_Full first name, so that wasn't the answer._

"Do you even have the faintest idea what a veela is?"

"Scary good singers? Just plain scary? Flock of Frenchies that herded me around like a goat all night while I set up tables? A blonde bird that nearly made me choke on my own tongue?"

"Bird?" Hermione grumbles.

"I mean…it's not the classiest thing to call a woman. But yeah. I mean, after the rest of her family followed me all night, mumbling at me, I was spitting up feathers."

"Bird. Why didn't I think of that? She loves British slang. Oh, that's brilliant!"

She flings herself into a hug.

"You smell like veela down. Wait. Ron," Hermione laughs, pretending to wave a stink away from her face. "Are you hooking up with one of her cousins? Her aunts? Merlin, not that I'd blame you. GABBY?"

"Nope. Just the leftovers from my jailers last night. Gabrielle is going to sigh herself into an early grave if she doesn't land Harry, you know that, Herm. Last night Fleur, uh, was doing doing a little _test_ of me to make sure I wouldn't do anything, and I quote, quintessentially English and moronic."

"Oh. Bet that was about as fun as the Spanish Inquisition."

"The what now?"

Hermione pinches her nose.

"First thing after the honeymoon, I am locking your entire family in a room with grammar school muggle textbooks."

"You wanted to tell me about veela?" he reminds her.

"Right."

Hermione sighs.

"Veela are what they're called in France but there are other names. Rusulka in Russia. Nymphs back in Ancient Greece. Faeries in Ireland. Elves in Sweden."

"Vampires in Transylvania?" He jokes.

"What? No. Different critter."

_Vampires exist. So that's scary._

"Josephine was a veela, Ron. At least quarter, probably half. There's debate but Helen of Troy too, probably. Cleopatra, we have actual proof."

"Josephine?"

"Napoleon's wife. So what I'm asking isn't if I looked like a woman you'd dance with, Ron. I was asking if I looked like a woman someone would _start a war over_."

"Well, I killed some blokes for torturing you…"

"Fair point," Hermione laughs. "God, our Hogwarts class is a messed up lot, aren't we? We have no business graduating. Be shocked if half of us aren't in asylums in five years."

"The three golden nitwits," Ron laughs. "I mean, you blew up the school. It was the only place you were ever good at someth-OW!"

She shakes her hand out. As if his shoulder didn't the worst of that punch.

"I could make some suggestions, I guess. But your dress is fine. We could change it if you wanted but we'd need to know...what do..."

"Veela like in a woman?" she prods. "No idea. Just because she's marrying me doesn't mean I know why."

"Not veela, Hermy. Whatsit."

"Lesbians?"

"That. I'd be an awful muggle, wouldn't I?"

"The worst. You’d starve before Harry and I could rescue you."

She glances back at the stack of self-help books.

"No bloody clue. Those are all written for women who like blokes."

"Well, the first thing I noticed about Fleur wa-"

"If you say tits, you'll be scrubbing bright green mushrooms off yourself for a week."

"Third thing," he assures her. "Her lips, Hermione. From the moment she walked into the hall, it's like she was always this close to smiling. After that, her walk."

"Huh?"

"She…"

He sighs.

"She walked different, even than the other Beauxbatons girls and they start on ballet in their second year. Fleur just…"

"Sort of flowed," Hermione remembers. "You couldn't really put your finger on it. For me, it was her shoulders. I wanked myself till I was sick the day after she came in in that backless dress for the Easter ball. I told myself I was thinking about a bloke but I think I did it because of her."

"I did not know that. I'm not sure I _needed_ to know that," he complains.

"The way her hands moved, taking notes. The way she'd play with her hair, especially when she wasn't aware anyone was looking."

"What do you think she noticed first about you?"

"Ron, my hair was a rat's nest all through fourth year. I had spots most of the time. I was not pretty."

"Fleur probably would disagree."

She lights up. Hermione with an idea. Never good. Maybe this one time, no one will die, or nearly get eaten, or attacked by a Dementor, or strangled by a plant. It'd be a nice change.

"Thanks. Better go before they run out of pastry. Save me a couple, yeah?"

——

When Hermione comes out of the tent just before sunset and takes Harry’s arm, her hair is braided around her head like a crown and she has on a pair of reading glasses. Her dress is black now, silk not lace. Much simpler. No frills or bunched up ruffles, just a red ribbon around her waist. A turtleneck collar, no sleeves and a opening in the back.

She must have changed her heels, too, because she’s a good two inches taller.

Fleur stops dead two steps out of her tent and just stares.

Ron never felt so smart in his entire life.


	3. Ripped Bodices, Crocodile Teeth, and Bus Passes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where Hermione realizes that a veela princess' bonding ritual _packs a punch_ and Fleur would like to have her clothes ripped off again _right now_ and Hermione takes her feathery family home to greet her parents.

Hermione is naked, freezing and worst, lost. Somewhere near the former Hogwarts, she suspects, or probably in Scotland. At the very least, somewhere where it rains and there’s grass. She can’t see the small city worth of tents that sprang up for the wedding, or the lake so she can’t be sure.

If she was still a muggle, she could at least count on not having sleep-teleported to another continent. Magic has its downsides.

Her memory is a haze past the middle of the reception. There was a rippling cry from the assembled veela when she kissed Fleur, a round of applause from everyone else. A sudden blur of gold and green, silk and skin and then it gets fuzzy. At least until she woke up in whatever mess she got herself into.

_“Mon Dieu.”_

Hermione turns. At least she didn’t misplace her wife. That would embarrass, not twelve hours into their life together.

Fleur looks awful though, her dress reduced to a handful of golden scraps hanging off her arms and her shoulder. Hips peppered with coin-sized bruises and lipstick all over her neck. One mark is an obvious handprint, like someone grabbed her and pinned her down with a hand on her shoulder. The only person she ever met with hands anywhere near that big is Hagrid but he would never do something so vile.

_Right?_

“Can we do ‘zat again at the muggle wedding?”

“Fleur, someone hurt you. Attacked you. Did someone ra-”

A delicate finger finds her lips before her worst fear can come tumbling out of her mouth. Fleur shakes her head. It looks ridiculous, with her hair looking like a mixture of liquid gold, mud, twigs and grass. Her hands must be sore, since she’s flexing her fingers to clear out knots.

_The gap in my memory._

It comes back in fits and spurts. The human guests saying their goodbyes for the night. A drunk Ron, being chased into a tent by two members of some Irish veela flock. A swooning Ginny being thrown over the shoulder of some golden-skinned giantess and carried away as coal black feathers sprouted up the woman’s neck.

The combined Geneva-Lyon flocks crowding around, chanting. A forest of silver skin and golden hair closing in as a laughing Fleur led Hermione to the altar at the center of the ruins. A wild place, the matriarch of the Geneva flock explained in a thick German accent. A place for creatures, wild things, like the veela of old. 

A bracelet sliding onto her wrist, a gift from the matriarch from Lyon — Fleur’s grandmother, ravishing at two hundred and change — and a matching one on Fleur, gifted by the Geneva matron. A speech in a language that was like French but distinctly not, perhaps a Veela specific form of Latin? She managed to catch a passage about maintaining peace through marriage. 

Fleur’s fingers carding her hair, loosening the braids, guiding Hermione’s hands to her hips. Blue irises vanishing into inky pupils. Fleur hopping on top of the altar and plucking at the ribbon that tied the dress on. Panting into the cold night air. A bolt of lightning.

No matter how she pushes her brain, she can’t remember more than Fleur under her, arching up to meet her as she sank into the kiss. The flock chanting. Lightning and intense pain. It ends there.

_Oh, Merlin…_

“Fleur, did I…was that me?”

A lazy, slanted smile crosses Fleur’s face.

“It was amazing, _ma petit lionne_. I knew there were changes with being crowned and mated but I was not expecting ze ritual to be so intense. But I am fine ‘Ermoine. Veela recover quickly. We need a great deal from our lovers. Better sore and smiling in the morning than miserable in the night. My magic is useful in times like this, no?”

“Don’t joke,” Hermione croaks.

The bruises are already fading, like purple petals sinking into a cup of milk.

“Though I liked the dress. You should buy me another one.”

_No! No clothes! No escape! Chase. Take. Breed._

“God, what is wrong with me?” Hermione groans. “It’s like I have a lunatic split personality all of a sudden.”

“Beloved,” Fleur shushes. She presses a kiss to Hermione’s lips. Hermione tries to be unconvinced.

“If you persist in frowning, I will persist in kissing.”

“Consider me warned,” Hermione jokes.

“Can you tell me more?” she pleads. “Fleur, I don’t think you realize how much this scares me. Not only can I not remember my own wedding night, you look like you lost a boxing match with a giant.”

Fleur sighs.

“You know I am ze next in line to my flock, yes?”

“Of course.”

“I will be called upon to lead. Mother will get bored and abdicate at some point, as grandmother did. Though perhaps she does not take quite so many lovers when she does. A whole winter, ‘alf the furniture in ze manor was sticky!”

“Merlin help me,” Hermione grumbles.

“As such, I have various duties. Managing ze fortune, arranging trade, leading defense of villages, so on. But also,” Fleur sighs. “Daughters. I am to provide ‘eirs to my name. To lead ze flock.”

“How is that relevant? We’ve talked about it, Fleur, but not much and we are not ready. I can’t have a baby with so much unsure. So soon after the war. We don’t even have jobs. It wouldn’t be fair to the child, not if I’m waking screaming every other night.”

Fleur nods.

“I realize this. We can wait many years, you could change your mind if you truly must. But ze ritual must be at the mating ceremony, or it is far more painful for all.”

“What is this ritual? I suspect I agreed to it, but last night is a mess. I don’t remember much.”

“Hermione,” Fleur sighs, taking her hand and bringing Hermione’s to rest against her throat. “We spoke about it weeks ago. Remember? About how you would lose part of your nature? Become more animal and less woman, like I am?”

Hermione blinks. She does recall that conversation and to be fair to Fleur, she recalls a hair-raising chat about side effects and possible complications. They swore an unbreakable vow. Hermione vowed that if they married, she would go through with it, Fleur vowed to help her.

“I suppose thought it would be exchanging drops of blood, like Elise and Moheim did.”

“We did not have that option. We are both women, but I am not human.”

_Yes, rub it in how you’re a goddess._

“Many spells meant for an ordinary witch do not work, or do too little or too much. Including fertility spells. We ‘ave secret ways among ourselves but it is ‘ardly unusual for veela to marry other sorts of women and sometimes zey are not even magical women. So ze couple is taken to a place of power and the flock pours our magic into them. Before the first mating, prayers are said.”

“That wasn’t our first time.”

“We had fucked, ‘Ermione. Which I enjoyed immensely and would have done every morning and every night until ze day I died. If it was only zat, still a good life. But until we said ze vows? We not made love, not like zat. Certainly not as wives. May I continue?”

_As if I could say no to that smirk._

“Please.”

“Ze ritual changes the other partner to be more like a veela. You are given a beast, a second nature like we have. This means that you can pass our wards, bear or sire children with us, and tolerate our thrall more easily.”

That’s probably for the best. Surprised I didn’t have a seizure the first time I saw her, let alone when I put my hands on her.

“This beast. What is it?”

She gets a hum and a slight roll of the shoulders, as if it was an actual answer.

“Depends on the woman. A cat, often. Foxes. A cobra once, though cousin Clarice is odd. Likes to carry Victoria around her neck. So I think her wife jinxed the altar to ensure that. Another bird, in a few blessed cases. Though I doubt you could relax long enough to let me take you in midair, my love. Your genius makes you too twitchy for such guilty pleasures.”

“In your case, like a woman blended with a stag. Massive. Your fur was the color of copper and quite thick. Like a fistful of velvet. When you were on top, it was like being pinned under a stack of blankets. So powerful! ‘Uge antlers which,” she grins. “Which were essential when I needed to keep you in place so I could ‘ave more of your mouth. Lustful beyond my expectations which, after my aunts scandalized me this summer, is impressive. Rather…”

Fleur’s lip twitches.

“Virile.”

”Oh my God! I cannot listen to this. I’m freaking out, Fleur. I don’t want to have something, anything, inside me that can hurt you. That can make me do things I cannot remember.”

Fleur yawns and stretches, arching her back and smacking her lips.

“You will remember next time, I suspect. There are ways to control your transformation, so zat it is partial and you can stay closer to your own shape. If you wish.”

Fleur’s wild eyes suggest that toning down the shape not be her choice.

“Ze fur is not optional, though. Whenever you shift, I want that. So decadent having it between my fingers!”

“It won’t be every time?”

“No, silly, of course not. Zat would be very inconvenient, always having to shift to enjoy each other. It would be difficult to do what I want if you were always ze stag. Closets. Dressing rooms. Restaurants when no one is looking. Coffee tables if we do not like ze people. Your other shape would not fit in those places and not making love wherever we like? Zat would be boring.”

_Yes. Heaven forbid it be impossible for us to traumatize people by fucking in their living room as an act of protest._

“The shifting varies with the witch. Full and new moons, or only the solstice. At will, if you practice enough. Now lay back down and cuddle me, my too-chivalrous wife. Let me enjoy being ravished and let yourself relax, yes? You have not ‘urt me, ‘Ermoine Granger. You could never.”

Fleur sinks back into the impromptu bed of ruined fabric and rain slicked grass. She pats a spot on her tummy, showing where she wants Hermione’s hand. She complies, palming the swell of warm flesh and pulling Fleur closer against her front with a quick tug. Fleur leads her other hand to her throat and covers it with her own, squeezing gently to ask for pressure. Either a veela thing, or a kink of Fleur’s but she craves having a hand around her throat, both during sex and just to cuddle. The effect is like picking a kitten up by the scruff of the neck. Fleur just melts. Hermione likes the hot dance of blood under her fingertips. Proof that Fleur is safe and alive and real.

“You remember how,” Fleur sighs. “Good.”

Her wife clearly isn’t bothered, and that’s important. There’s really nothing left she can ask, and it’s getting dark. Better to wait until morning to go looking for help.

She presses a kiss to Fleur’s shoulder blade and lets Fleur’s happiness be enough for them both, at least for today.

——

After receiving special dispensation at the ministry — after all, her unmailed letters to American and German friends could undo Wizarding Britain forever — the aurors allowed them schedule a second ceremony in her hometown so long as ‘distasteful displays’ and ‘security risks’ are at a minimum. Which to the ministry, means not too many veela guests and no one says the word ‘lesbians’. 

She’ll be curious to see what Fleur’s grandmother thinks of the tortured, prudish wording of the permit.

The front-line teams all answer to Tonk’s replacement and former partner Elle Moon, a quick-witted, ethereally pale, incredibly foul-mouthed Irishwoman. The older sister of her roommate Lily at Hogwarts. 

Fleur can’t stand her, and she seems as riled by Fleur as Fleur is by her. Neither will eat a meal if the other one might have been present when it was cooked. They repeat back everything the other one says and demand to know if that is the exact meaning. They angrily avoid letting each other share tasks, or read different pages on the same copy of the Daily Prophet, or even bring things from the kitchen. Snarls bubble up Fleurs throat whenever Elle is so much as a millimeter closer to Hermione than she is.

Fleur finally caved to her demand for an apology and an explanation when a still-clothed Hermione climbed into the other side of the bed. To Fleur, lovers hiding from each other, sleeping together clothed even just for sleeping is nothing short of desecration.

Their faerie instincts are acting up. The Moons are a _leanan sidhe_ clan as old as the first stone arrowheads chipped in Ireland. Small in number but also powerfully gifted in allure, mentalism, spatial alteration, and blood magic. Legend has it that the last outright attack on them ended when the booby trapped chapel they were gathering in decided that it never really had existed. Without help, it’s impossible to apparate out of a place that isn’t operating like normal reality.

No treaty exists between them and the Delacour. No life debts. No secret lovers to legitimize. No favors to be exchanged for non-aggression. Because of the war, the veela and other clans, tribes and peoples in the fae world turtled up and avoided socializing. They could not keep emissaries safe, and to lose an emissary guaranteed a war rather than risking one like a lapsed treaty would. 

A delicate web of unbreakable promises that has held the peace between groups of fae and fae-blooded humans for twelve centuries is fraying, strands broken with each new moon as treaties expire.

Nothing enforces a peace between Moon and Delacour. Absent that the struggle to prove one’s strength is the sole imperative between unrelated faeries and it is deep as their bones. The only thing stopping war is the ability of the two stressed-out women to ignore everything they are telling them to prove herself against the challenger. Fleur’s mind trying to reconcile being mated but having a second wedding coming up as well and to top it off, a stranger of fae blood on bodyguard duty for _her mate,_ ringing every alarm bell she has. 

The disconnect is clearly burning her up and Hermione hates seeing it but Fleur is determined to push through. Hermione's not been able to talk her into canceling.

Hermione is trying to manage fifteen odd half blood and pure-blood friends who haven’t a clue how to open a tin of soup or set an air conditioner while also worrying about her wife getting into a clawing, spitting, rabid weasel type fight with magical law enforcement.

Now she has to factor in that the law enforcement in question is technically a vampire, albeit one inclined to snacking, harps, melancholy ramblings and florid love letters. More like Jane Eyre than Dracula, from what little she’s been able to lay her hands on about the breed.

Here she stands, thirty miles from home and waiting for the bus like any other girl about to come out to her parents. The pair of crocodile teeth portkeys in her pocket seem to weigh more every minute as she debates bringing them back or not.

The war is over, but there no doubt are Death Eaters left on the loose.

Her parents don’t remember her. She remembers them.

They taught her not to fight, cheat or lie. They’re only alive because she’s exceptionally good at each.

It’s not a matter of whether she should — by any logic, she absolutely should not — or of whether they would be proud. 

In their scrubbed brains, she’s gone. It's impossible to be ashamed or proud of that which does not exist.

It’s her ego. The first woman awarded inducted in the Order of Morgana since before the end of the first millennium. Commendations from the Secretary of the Arcane in America and the Société de Sorcellerie in France. Honored by the governments of exchange students from Chile to Russia.

She doesn’t care. What she really wants is her _mom and dad_ to know she is safe and that she is glad to be their daughter.

For them to meet Fleur.

Around fireplaces and campfires, dark wizards and would be tyrants will always trade hushed tales of the Mongoose. Scrawny. Quiet. Merciless. Fond of knives, poisons and traps. She couldn’t stop her legend as a fighter if she tried. The fact that she plans to go into either teaching or medicine, not auroring or curse-breaking means she will remain undefeated in duels.

She could crush these teeth and live a life feted with praise, grow old waking up beside the most beautiful creature ever to walk the earth. All without risking her parents. She could remove her own memory of them, and the _fidelius_ charm would seal them away from magic forever. Dumbledore told her that if the keeper of the secret can no longer share it, the spell folds in on itself. The paradox consumes the magic in the surrounding area, leaving a null void where spells fizzle, magical senses and scrying fail and magic sensitive, people become confused and disoriented.

Wizards never use it that way among themselves for fear of ruining the lives the spell protects. For a muggle-born desperate to save her non-magical parents, the spell was ideal.

“You all right dear?” Molly asks.

Hermione gasps.

They’re still at the bus station. Down the road, she sees the bus cough up two young men at the fence of the McConnell farm.

“It's hard,” she admits.

“Course it is, dearie. I look at you and your courage and your smarts and I think you’re what Ginny would be like if I raised her, rather than leaving her brothers and school to do half of it.”

The bus hisses to a stop, its windows and cherry red paint dewy with the low fog on the fields.

Busses and muggle-ignorant wizards. Great fun.

“Everyone remember how this works?” Hermione grits out.

A chorus of ‘oui’ and ‘yes’ bubbles up around her.

“Right, Weasleys first. So many of you we should just do that half anyway,” she teases.

Molly tuts fondly and herds her children onto the bus, Ginny first. After nearly dying in the Battle of Hogwarts, Ginny probably isn't going to be allowed more than twenty feet away from her mother for a few decades.

“Beautiful day, isn’t it?” Arthur asks the driver.

“Aye. Put in your ticket.”

Arthur Weasley interacting with muggles is always a delight. He’s always so close to right and so far, far, far away from it all at once. At least he's cheery and over-eager. Helps make up.

“Slide,” she whispers, pointing at the ticket-slot.

“Ah, yes. It’s just so springy!” he gushes.

He’d been frantically tapping the perforated ticket into the ashtray where smokers put their cigarettes out.

As the bus trundles along, she figures out why Arthur did that. Because the ashtray was yellow and so was the smartphone scanner on the London Metro. Two pieces of yellow plastic. Both round. Both related to getting on board muggle public transport.

The ride itself is aching. Her gut flops each time she passes a café, or a park, or anything at all between the outskirts of the city and Hampstead.

She comes up short at the edge of the driveway. 

She can pass the wards but that's useless. She needs to unfurl and rebuild them and she did them in a sleepless, angry sprint so she's short on details but confident sure she can hurt herself if she sets them off.

The version of herself that cast these a year and a half ago might as well be a different species in terms of both magical skill, anger issues, and trauma. All three play into the mindset for making a properly dangerous ward for one's home.

Sixteen-year-old Hermione wasn’t broken like today Hermione is. If she’s being honest, she forgot which runes, riddles and puzzles what she put in the wards exactly.

“Stand back, please.”

Fleur tugs on the crimson ribbon tied to her blouse’s sleeve and her wand slides into her hand.

“Together, ‘Ermoine.”

They get through the puzzles easily enough. Fleur has to pull her back once when the answer that seems right to her leads to a devastatingly powerful blast of flame that shatters her shield.

“You were sad, love. Remember?”

She tries again, using the more obviously angst-laden choice. The one picked by a teenager who has to go away forever because people don’t understand her.

The wards finally surrender.

“May I, Fleur?”

“Of course. Quite ze scandal if I could not set foot in ze in-law’s house, no?”

It’s a matter of another hour before she has the wards disassembled and two before she can rework them to accept some faeries but not others.

She just can’t figure out how to program them.

British wizarding education is useless to make these sort of subtle distinctions. 

Humans good, everything bad is what the formulas she knows can handle. Turns out French curriculum is little better because it’s individual. Even the ward-happy veelas, always binding their homes and businesses to the land under their feet, use names. They lean on their meticulously kept family trees, business letters, and thank-you notes for gifts received to compile names of the allowed and disallowed. 

Pull apart the intricate wards around a country estate after Sunday Mass every week to insert or subtract a single name among thousands, and it becomes something effortless. Even if the mind-buggering complexity of the enchantment would make the best goblin curse-smiths ears dry up.

She doesn't have that kind of practice and Fleur is a rebel. She knows far more about breaking curses and sneaking around than she does about making wards and charming home offices and workshops to ensure the success of her family's work and hobbies.

Unless Hermione sits here and brainstorms the name and description of every creature that’s like a veela but not quite, she can't teach it to tell Fleur apart from a mermaid or a pixie. Unless she can put in all the names of all the veela or families who can’t enter when Fleur can, it's open to any veela.

Fleur’s leaning against an oak up the street, talking to someone back home on her phone, pulling it away from her ear now and again to tap on pictures they’re sending her.

“Blood,” Hermione whispers. “We just teach it with a drop of her blood. God, I’m stupid. Fleur!”

It will never get old watching Fleur Delacour hear Hermione say her name, look up and smile.


	4. Recovered Memories, Raspberry Fudge Cake, Realizing Things, and Refurbishing a Home

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where her parents awake to a flock of blondes, there's an embarrassing photo from Hermione's childhood, she once tried to defraud the Royal Mail, Hermione's mum ships it, her dad is slow on the uptake and Harry knows how to bake Hermione's favorite cake.

The spinning and the whistling sound have stopped. He was at home with his wife and now…it's blurry, but he could swear this is their old house. Didn’t they sell that years ago? When they moved to Australia?

He wants to look around, but can't move. Like he’s been tied up. He can’t speak either, even though he can breathe normally and move his mouth.

_“Finite incantato.”_

The blurriness is gone and he can move his hands too.

Who are these people? Eight redheads. A family from the look of it, mother, father, three brothers and a daughter. A ginger woman the size of a battleship with an Irish flag tattooed on her forearm and a nasty look on her face. She looks like a fighter, and not only because of the brass knuckles dangling on a chain looped around her belt. Something in her eyes. A lovely shade of green but the way she stares straight through him and the way she sweeps her gaze across the room like she expects the carpet to grow teeth and bite makes him nervous.

Then there’s the matter of at least three dozen blondes, all of them women and all of them unreasonably attractive. The family resemblance isn’t just strong. It’s positively blinding. Finely cut jaws, high cheekbones and full lips. Face after face. Every eye in the crowd is a brilliant blue, somewhere between teal and violet. One rises out from the pack, taller than the others. Standing proud like a general reviewing troops. A black camelhair coat over a charcoal grey blouse, tight pants of cherry-red leather and tall boots of white calfskin.

The pants are too scandalous for the office but the bearing, the bracelet on her wrist and the expensive cut and cloth all seem like a businesswoman, more than anything. Up-and-comer trying to push through the pack of old boys. She reminds him of the woman who runs that ghastly chain of low-quality dental clinics in Melbourne. Except for the part where her smile doesn’t make him cringe.

”Jean, dear?"

_Who’s Jean?_

His wife’s name is Monica, isn’t it?

No, Jean. His wife’s name is Jean. Now he remembers. If they ever had a daughter, her middle name would be Jean, it’s traditional in her family.

All terribly confusing. Maybe that hygienist his wife fired because she kept tying to flirt with him broke in and left the gas on? If so, they don’t have long and this is far too confusing of a hallucination to die in.

“Just a minute, dad. She hasn’t woken up yet.”

Dad?

He turns to his left. A young woman in a ponytail is cradling his wife’s face. Muttering to herself, this strange — and yet so familiar! — woman checks Jean’s pupils and starts dabbing some sort of odd, glowing lipstick off both their lips.

“Hermione?” she whispers.

“Yeah,” the young woman chokes. “Yeah. It’s me, mum.”

Mother and daughter crash into each other's arms.

That woman is his daughter. His _daughter_.

Hermione Jean Granger.

The best thing that ever happened — that could ever happen — to him and his wife. He knows that yesterday he didn’t have a daughter. He also somehow knows that they have had a daughter for probably nineteen years if they count all the time they spent talking to and telling stories to Jean’s belly when she was pregnant.

He now remembers before the lie, during the lie, and after the lie.

The lie fit the world perfect yesterday. The lie is still there. Yesterday it was real. Now the truth is there too, and there’s no comparison. The truth is sturdy and best of all, the truth has Hermione in it. It’s propping him up when all these new gingers, blondes, and surprise daughters make him dizzy. 

Everything seems like it’s a little true and a little false, all at once. This is why he disliked philosophy class in college.

“I’m so sorry,” she croaks, burying herself in her mother’s arms. Her body shakes and clenches as she cries. Jean cradles this almost-grown baby of hers like she never once let go. Feminine intuition, perhaps, or she’s got the courage to postpone the panic about this baffling situation. Courage he knows full well he lacks.

The strange blonde kneels beside her, pressing a kiss to her hair and rubbing the parts of Hermione’s back that her mother isn’t busy clinging to.

“Thanks, Fleur.”

“ _Toujours, mon amour_ ,” the stranger murmurs.

\-----

Jean is cradling a pint of ice cream to her forehead. Everyone is tired, even though Hermione and Fleur can hide it better — oh, to be young again — but neither of the Grangers want to risk falling asleep.

It’s too precious to have her baby back. If she closes her eyes, what if Hermione was just a dream?

“You’re a wizard.”

“Witch.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Wizards are men. I’m a woman.”

“Zis is true,” Fleur chortles.

Fleur seems to have decided to lay the charm on Tim, probably working him up to the point she’ll ask for his permission to marry Hermione.

Not that either woman has admitted that’s why they’re here, yet.

Her baby hasn’t told her she fancies girls. For such a smart girl, she doesn’t think much of her own mother’s eyesight. Hermione has tried to avoid staring at Fleur every spare minute and had some success but Fleur hasn’t bothered. When they sit close, their hands dangle as if they tilted gravity for each other. Put the world on a slant to get their fingers entwined.

Whenever Hermione looks away from Fleur, Fleur steals a glance. Smiles, or twirls a spring of golden hair, or chews her lip. Seems like every time Hermione laughs, Fleur buzzes in her chair. That girl isn’t fooling anybody. She seems like quite a nice young lady. She’s not sure what frightens Hermione about this, only that it is frightening. So she owes it to Hermione to act surprised.

The energy that powered Hermione through her day is gone. She’s sputtering along like she used to do in football club when she was little and the game went too far over time.

“You need some decaf tea,” Jean tells her daughter, nudging with her foot. “So you can sleep.”

Everything in the kitchen is set up exactly the same, even the silverware being in the under sink drawer, which her friends would tease her about at book club. The property must have been kept up by Hermione and kept for her and Tim, because that silly melted lump of clay that Hermione made as a ‘pot’ in preschool is on the shelf over the sink with just a whisper of dust on it.

Jean suspects that a feather duster leaps out of the cupboard on its own accord, like clockwork, once a week.

Not an heirloom, exactly. That lump means something to them but wouldn’t interest a prowler. What makes a building a house. No doubt it would get thrown away if the place was being shown. There are dishes and spoons and a teakettle from the department store. Fresh bought and rinsed. It’s all tidy and matching. She has this funny hunch that if she asks, the clones that seem to have accompanied her wife’s sweetheart would have their house in Melbourne empty and move them in here by noon tomorrow without one drop of sweat on one golden hair.

“‘Mione?” she whispers.

Her daughter is face down, asleep on the kitchen table and her neck will hurt in the morning, teenage vigor or no. She has more questions than she can ask in a lifetime, but Hermione needs the sleep.

She looks towards the stack of shopping bags in the corner. Soft spoken, affectionate blonde women have been flowing through the house like fall leaves, hugging her, kissing her cheeks, thanking her and when she asks why, saying simply 'Hermione'.

With so many people in the house, surely someone must have thought they’d need blankets?

“I’ll get her,” Fleur whispers. “May we?”

“May you what?”

“Well…”

Jean cocks an eyebrow.

“Go on?”

Fleur flinches. This woman has blue eyes, pale and bright as a bolt of lightning in the night sky. She looks like the illegitimate daughter of a shampoo commercial and a skin commercial that got taken in by a High Street socialite. 

Merely the fact that she caught Hermione’s eye suggests that’s she’s brilliant and ambitious, whatever that means out in the magic world. Probably could turn Jean and her husband into newts with a blink. Or painted ceramic figurines. Or painted ceramic newts.

If it’s possible to be scary good-looking, Fleur is. The ghostly shade of her skin, delicateness of her face, the stillness of her posture and half a dozen little things add an uneasy patina on top of her good looks.

One friendly question, and Fleur flinches because she thinks there’s a wrong answer here. Jean will have to have her husband just corner them tomorrow and make Fleur ask. It might kill Fleur to dance around the topic much longer.

“She takes after you in more ways than you know. When you’re cross, it’s like I’m seeing into my future,” Fleur says with a shake of the head. “Lucky me. There are nightmares. She sleeps better if, ah…”

“I’m not cross,” she assures Fleur. “I’m teasing. Do they not have teasing in France? Does Hermione usually sleep alone, at home?”

“No.”

“I thought not,” Jean chuckles. “Twenty-first century and all that.”

“Take the master bedroom,” she tells Fleur.

Fleur scowls. “Never. I’d never disrespect a matron in her nest like that. Chased out of the flock if I upstaged a matron that way.”

Jean makes a note to ask about all this bird-related slang of Fleur’s in the morning. Probably linked to the uncanny beauty that each of the women possesses and their oddly uniform appearance. Birdwatcher's social club, maybe. Or a magical sorority. Sorority makes sense, given that they all seemed to be wearing a silver brooch with a dove made of inlaid rubies carrying a telescope and a saber in its grip.

Fleur looks back towards the living room and raises two fingers.

A half dozen fuzzy blankets float out of the linen closet. All of the the couch cushions fly off and arrange themselves in a low half-circle. Blankets fold and tuck themselves and layer after layer of gauzy sheeting lands on top, anchored by seemingly nothing at all.

“Cozy.”

Fleur chuckles.

“Summons a blanket fort. Our friend Luna taught us that one.”

\-----

"Fleur! No! Wait!"

Hermione vaults the couch and sprints towards the bookshelf by the patio. Her friend is tiptoeing through Jean's favorite books. Ironically enough for the magicless mother of a witch, fantasy is her secret love. Lord of the Rings is her favorite.

Before Hermione can reach her friend, she sees it.

"'Zis is very charming."

Hermione hates that picture. Loathes it. Has tried on multiple occasions to destroy it. The first inkling they had of how smart she was at age six when she tried to get rid of the picture.

She managed to get it shipped off through the mail, without postage. Thanks to a mail order toaster they were returning, a spare box and a fault buried sixty pages into in the rules regarding postage free mailing of refunds in the Royal Mail. She even included chocolates as a 'tip' for destroying it, nestled in a chilled sample bag she nicked from the clinic so they wouldn't melt. It made it all the way to a glass-recycling factory's shipping dock before someone noted that even though the penmanship was good, but still a child's. Proud as could be, he kept the original and brought home a replica. Every year since, they await Hermione's latest bit of spycraft in her ongoing war with a photo of herself and their skiing trip to Colorado.

Every teacher and psychologist since has given the same message in between the lines. Jean and he are smart. Doctors. Gifted in their fields. They're not _frighteningly_ , _world-changingly brilliant,_ like their little Mione. If she hadn't ended up being just as magic as they always thought, he shudders to think how boring school would have been.

"So charming!" Fleur chortles. "Your smile! Your little skis! Ooh. And ze bird you're holding! An eagle chick? 'ave you had zis fascination with feathers your entire life, then?"

"I was four," Hermione practically snarls. "It was hurt. Fell out of a tree."

Hermione snatches at the picture and her friend pirouettes out of the way before grabbing Hermione around the hip and pulling her in against her side, where she fidgets and keeps trying to get a grip on the picture. Strange friendship, these two have. Lots of hugs and touching. Oddly like Jean and himself at university, in the early days. Even though they were a couple and not just friends. Must be something that's changed since he went to school.

"I was afraid you'd find that...it looks even worse now that I know you."

"Ze entire war," Fleur sighs, shaking her head. She nods at Hermione. 

"Ze entire war, zis woman fears nothing. Nothing at all. Zis is quite a shock, knowing that my wife does not want me to see her mothering feathered creatures. My veela is heartbroken, 'ermione."

"Fleur!" Hermione hisses.

"What?" she chortles, handing the photo over.

A young man with messy brown hair and glasses appears in in the back garden with a popping sound like a champagne cork. So suddenly he wonders if maybe the grass decided that it had been waiting long enough with no impossible things happening there, and it was time to catch up. Shortly after he arrives, a ginger woman with a thick coat of freckles pops in beside him. They're followed an instant later by a small blonde woman with skin so pale she probably belongs in a hospital.

"'Arry! Ginny! Luna!" Fleur calls out, abandoning a sputtering Hermione to greet them.

"Blimey," mumbles a man behind him. "I thought I was the only one who could piss you off like that with one sentence, Hermy."

"Shut it, Ron."

Jean sets down the pan she was rinsing. She leans on the counter, looks out the back window and smiles.

"Already married, then."

Tom just stares at his wife. Surely she didn't go mad when her memories were restored?

"Who?"

"Hermione, of course. To Fleur."

"Really? What makes you think that?"

Rather than a reply, he gets a soapy, dripping sponge tossed in his face.

"Well, Fleur admitted it, for one. Also, I have eyes, Thomas Granger."

"I thought she was with Ron?"

"Nah," the burly ginger laughs, sitting down at the table beside Tom. "That was ages ago. She said I was a beard. Must be some muggle term I don't know."

Hermione sinks to her knees and groans. Jean leans over the breakfast counter, smirking.

"Now, now, dear. I saw you two. You were miles cozier than I've ever been with a friend. I saw how you couldn't stop touching her or looking at her. You've never been like that with anyone in your entire life. I've only ever acted like that around your father."

"At least you fooled your dad, Hermy, that's something."

"Though I'm still mad about the whole memory-wiping nonsense. And I definitely need to hear more, young lady. Like this war business. What in God's name a veela is."

Jean tosses another sponge, this time a dry one. It bounces off Hermione's head.

"Well that's easy," Ron scoffs. "Veela's a fit French bird with murder eyes, innit?"

"Fuck off, Ron."

Hermione sighs.

"Bugger me sideways. Right. Lets clear the table and make some coffee and I guess I'll tell you everything about the last eighteen months."

She winces.

"And about half of everything for the last seven years, if I'm honest."

Harry hugs Hermione soon as he's in the door and she ruffles his hair like a misbehaving pup.

"Hi, Harry. Remember how I taught you that cake recipe?"

"Raspberry outside, fudge inside cake? Sure."

"Exactly. ROFIC. Your lucky day, Harry. I need you to make about five of them. I'll need the chocolate before long."

Jean scoffs.

"They're the best addition to the family recipes in ages, dear but they take about twelve hours to bake."

"Oh, I know. It gets rough a third of the way in."


	5. Wedding Bells and Toxic Berries - Part 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where Jean learns what a veela is and a wedding needs a venue

Jean stares at her daughter.

Her daughter who has been a child soldier since age fourteen. Her daughter who the other wizarding types here look at like she's a savior, a warrior heaven-sent. Her daughter who organized a relocation campaign that sent four hundred thousand Britons to safer places so quietly that the BBC is just joking about 'some great new spot for a holiday'. Her daughter who took up the role of general to allied armies. Her daughter who met with terrorists and Russian traitors to get her hands on non-magical weapons and poisons that even this megalomaniac couldn't survive. Her daughter who got an exception for dissecting a fetal pig at age nine but tore a man's throat open and ate a raw human heart because 'the ritual demanded it' and sacrifices had to be made.

Her daughter who had to turn herself into something between a stone-age war chieftain and General Eisenhower just to finish school.

Her daughter who didn't _cry_ at any part of the story until she talked about blocking off their memories of her and sending them away. Out of reach of magical hunters and on a strictly muggle paper trail. Who orphaned _herself_ rather than think about them being hurt.

Jean jumps up and sprints for the trashcan just in time to vomit her coffee and toast into it.

Two powerful hands land on her back.

"There, there," Ron says, rubbing circles. "My mum handled it way worse."

"I've met Molly," Jean croaks. "I doubt that."

"Nah! She really did. After fifth year, she enchanted a spoon to take a swing at me if I tried to leave the house."

Hermione kneels beside her.

"Oral purification charm?"

Jean shrugs her assent.

" _Dentrificus abluti_ ," Hermione says, tapping her wand to Jean's chin.

At least a cup of minty, sugary liquid forms in her mouth, swirling briskly against every surface. Before she can spit it out in surprise, it just _vanishes._

"Neat trick," she mutters. "Put dentists out of business."

"Hardly," her baby girl laughs. "Magic medicine is great at putting the left side of a ribcage back after a dragon bite, utter rubbish at basic preventatives."

"Really?"

"Zis is true," Fleur replies from where she's gradually picking apart a croissant. The guests have transformed her kitchen into a beehive of chuckling, whispered gossip in fast French just past Jean's rusty grasp, blonde bodies dancing around each other and sinfully delicious things being levitated from counter to plates.

"I 'ave a mastery as a mediwitch, but until 'Ermione told me about germ theory, I 'ad not 'eard of it."

"You're kidding."

Hermione shakes her head.

"Mediwitches like Fleur can point their wands and say some words and tell if someone's infected and often with what, since so many magical diseases have a specific signature. Take the patient, put them in a room with a fresh air potion and a self-replicating apple and loaf of bread. Raise a stasis charm and they're fully isolated. Indefinitely. Air tight, thermally sealed, you name it."

Jean takes a bite of a sinfully flaky croissant that someone–ninety percent odds someone blonde–pressed into her hand when she wasn't looking.

"So why develop germ theory?" she asks herself. "They've reached the _goal_ of treating disease and there's perfect quarantine, so why go through all the boring experimental stuff science we did?"

"Exactly, mum."

"Alchemists do experiments," one of Ron's brothers pipes up. She's got Ron and Ginny down pat—partially because she's had to scold Ginny for mounting Harry in the parlor _twice—_ but she's not gotten the names of all the others down.

"Good point. Alchemists and arithmancers and, to a limited degree, spell engineers. Curse-breakers...but that's not research, exactly. More like self-preservation."

"Alchemists keep their notes and show their work. Things like what the potion ingredient didn't react to? What magical factors don't equal balance? Those details are useful for the next guy. The rest of the time it's find a result, write it down, sell the book rights and eventually forget which room you forgot your notes in," Hermione explains.

She chuckles.

"It's funny, but for people who can use magic, we're not a curious bunch. Definitely not like muggle scientists. There are amazing craftsmen for everything from bags to wands to hats to cauldrons, and duelists and warriors and enchanters, but not many researchers. Plenty of schools of magic are what we call complete. Nutritomancy, for instance. It tastes like soggy cardboard but conjured porridge will keep you alive and _aguamenti_ evocations will keep you hydrated."

She twirls her wand idly.

"I don't know what it's called exactly, but there's a subset of transfiguration that's for making clothes. Cleaning charms for hygiene if I'm out of water. Fire's a cinch. Any animal I can see, I can kill instantly with a slicing charm. I know enough healing and keep enough potions in reserve to get myself out of any scrape where I'm conscious. This little piece of wood is—in theory—the only tool I need for the rest of my life. Long as I'm okay living in a cottage made of magically woven sticks in the woods, at least."

"Everyone can prevent themselves from going hungry, or getting sick, and just make shelter? You're talking about a post-scarcity society, baby girl. Like science fiction."

Hermione laughs.

"We're not, but now that you say that, it's maybe only because we're stupid. I had to look up all those survival charms, but they should be taught by third year. Harry…"

Hermione leans over the back of her chair so she can look into the other room. One of Fleur's family brought in a Xbox and a Wii as part of refurnishing, and both are seeing lots of use. Hermione and Fleur have taken a shine to the latter. There's something disgustingly sweet watching her daughter pretend to wave a tennis racket while her intended does the same and inevitably, a victorious Fleur wraps her arms around Hermione and snogs her breathless.

Harry's in there with Ginny and Gabrielle right now, playing some game that involves lots of _zap!_ and _zing!_ sounds.

"How many muggleborn in our class, you figure?"

He clicks his tongue.

"Hundred, maybe a hundred and fifty? Toss in muggle-raised and half-bloods and it's most of the school."

Hermione chews her lip.

"Wonder how many of those had parents who were doctors and architects and whatnot? Lawyers, too. Our muggle processes are miles ahead, even if our results aren't."

Ron lets out a long whistle.

"I think _all the holes_ in the Wizgamot and the Department of Mysteries just clenched. Simultaneously," he jokes.

"About bloody time. We're the second generation to live through a war in thirty years because no one set up proper anti-bullying standards at school."

Fleur breezes through. The woman seems to glide, pad, tiptoe, swish, traipse and late at night, waltz with her head tucked on Hermione's shoulder. She never does something so boring as a walk _._ She has her phone pressed to her ear, and she's hissing angrily at someone at the other end of the line.

"No on the church, love?" Hermione asks.

Fleur nods.

"That's our forth turn-down. You'd think we were asking to burn it down, not get married."

"Not everyone's as smart as you or Hermione. They might not understand why any woman marrying my little girl is the luckiest creature on earth."

Fleur stiffens at creature, and her eyes flash from blue to gold.

_Something to ask about._

"Looking for venues early? Smart."

Hermione's cheeks go red as the filling on the cake she's been pecking at.

"Actually, from a wizarding perspective, the ceremony was a year ago Thursday. The veela bonding ritual...three days before that, love?"

"You came back here to get married where your father and I could see it, didn't you?"

"Course I did. I meant to come restore your memories earlier but when a civil war breaks out and hits a school, the funerals take a while."

"'Ermione, can I have your hand?" Fleur coos.

Shrugging, Hermione gives it. Fleur wiggles a ring—a wide silver band with a fat head with a symbol on it outlined in sapphire—off Hermione's finger.

"Do I 'ave your blessing?" she asks Jean.

"I'm…" she stammers. "Yes. Of course. Her father's too, least if I could find him."

Fleur shakes her head.

"Ze veela are matriarchal. All veela are women, born or married, like 'Ermione is. Our 'usbands are not veela. Zey are simply ours."

Jean nods.

"Hermione Jean Granger," Fleur asks, kneeling down. "Will you marry me?"

"Ask me a thousand times," Hermione whispers. "It'll always be yes."

\-----

Fleur reaches out to pat Jean's shoulder.

"Zis is a lot."

Jean looks up without taking her head off the tablecloth.

"You're some kind of winged sex faeries and your bodies can instantly detect a soul mate. Rather than blushing, when looking at Hermione makes you randy, you break out in feathers and some of your nieces went for a fly around the city like I'd go for a jog. From a human perspective? It's terrifying."

"I would not say sex faeries. Our allure, ze magic zat draws partners to us? It works on any lover _except_ ze mate. When I met 'er, everyone in ze room wanted to kiss me. Most wanted to bed me. Hermione blushed, and looked interested but said I was blocking her reading light. Zat's 'ow I knew. Magic can get my a warm body. Love? I must earn."

"Sex faeries _until_ you turn into romance comedies, then."

Fleur smiles over the rim of her coffee cup.

"Precisely."

\-----

They soon decide that their best hope for a venue is a nearby nature reserve and then coming back into town for the reception. A hybrid ceremony of ancient matriarchal priestesses and Jean's Methodism. Fleur decides she wants to find the perfect tree and so she strips down to a plain T-shirt and black jeans before spreading her wings and taking to the air with a small mirror clenched tight in one hand.

Hermione holds a similar mirror in hers and soon it becomes clear they're using them like mobile phones. They talk about ashes, and majestic old oaks, and then Fleur circles a massive yew probably older than the Roman Empire. It looks mostly dead and its trunk must be ten or fifteen meters across. It could encircle a small home.

Jean watches over her child's shoulder as they talk about various trees in the heart of the forest.

"That one!" Hermione exclaims. "We'll do some reinforcing runes, transfigure a door, expand the interior. Just make a little chapel. We will need to find either a wizard or squib minister and photographer, though."

"A what now?"

"Squibs are members of magical families who can't actually _do magic_ but they know about our world. Won't be surprised walking into a tree that's three times larger on the inside. Wizarding photographer, that's a must. Collin from school, maybe. Major shutterbug."

"What do you need from me, 'Mione?"

"Huh?"

"The mother of the bride helps with the ceremony, don't you think?"

"Right. Sorry. Been self-sufficient too long. Um, transportation to the edge of town. Bunch of people apparating into thin air will look suspicious. Maybe carpool in any muggle guests?"

"We can have those?"

"Sure. I can check for anyone who's allowed to know and for the rest, There's a suggestibility charm, I guess you'd call it. So they can remember the ceremony perfectly, but only in dreams or daydreams. They can enjoy it but they won't realize it was actually real, so they won't report it."

Hermione's shoulders droop.

"Do you still have a way to get in touch with Maggie? Or my maths teacher?"

Jean nods.

**Author's Note:**

> ##  [ Want to see the posh stuff? Want to see future chapters early? ](https://rb.gy/b1fjhr)  
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